Class # 10 - Our Final Class :(

I can not believe our assistive technology class has come to an end tonight! I have mixed emotions right now...relief that I will have a little extra time in my extremely busy schedule but also sadness because I have been learning so much in this class and know I have much more to learn! After June I plan to set aside a certain time for assistive technology exploration. There is so much out there and it is constantly changing that I feel I need to do this to keep up with it all and better serve my students. I am already on the School Program Planning Team and I plan to take my newly acquired knowledge and share it at these meetings when student referrals are discussed and looking for strategies to assist them. I also plan on talking to my administration about setting up an Assistive Technology PLC in our school so interested teachers can meet and share expertise and then plan and share regular presentations or sessions for the staff around various aspects of assistive technology. I would like to see our school set aside at least one afternoon a month dedicated to increasing our awareness and knowledge around assistive technology. I currently sit as co-chair on our accreditation team and plan on bringing up at our next session the possibility of adding an assistive technology awareness goal! My goal is to increase the communication amongst staff regarding student services and create a whole school student programming ownership culture; this should not just be laying on the shoulders of our student services staff! Teachers will need to become familiar with the assistive technology framework where they look at the student first and they look at the task they are hoping to complete, the environment or milieu in which the task is to be completed and then looks at the suggested technology that can support and enable the person to complete the task successfully. Another crucial component is the aspect of time. Staff needs to realize that this is not something that can be accomplished in one meeting. All five of these components affects and impacts each other and needs to be looked at in detail and in an ongoing process. It is not a static process where once you think you have found a support the process is over. As a team we will need to be constantly gathering evidence to see what is working, what is not working and asking why. By doing this one will see how this process can impact growth of students and teachers and how it can change our school's culture where we truly do support all students! I have learned so much in this class that it is impossible to list it all here in this space! I now feel better equipped to serve my students better in helping them all experience success after learning about the different AT frameworks, different AT available and the more modern forms of AT with apps for iPhones, iPods and iPods! I am still blown away with all the various apps and how easily they could be integrated into a student's program! And we just scratched the surface of what is out there!!! I have already paired up with one teacher in my school that is also passionate about implementing iPods and iPads into the classrooms and hope to continue to work with her on this! I also have developed a deeper appreciation for what some of my students are going through with their disabilities in reading and writing after walking through the very complicated process. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my instructor, Barbara, and all my classmates for sharing their wealth of knowledge and experiences with me. Words can not express how much I have learned in these short 10 weeks! I really enjoyed all discussions, projects, blogging and research!! Best of luck to everyone as we continue on our journey of facilitating learning in all our students!

Link to Grade 7 Ecosystems Blog

Check out the awesome blog that Stephanie, Karla, Nicole and I created for a Grade 7 Ecosystems Unit. Lots of great resources!!! Science 7:Ecology Unit Blog

Class # 9 - traditional AT, UDL and more blogging!!!

I can not believe we are down to our last class, hard to believe. The time went by so quick and I have learned soooo much!! Tonight we looked at some traditional assistive technology that is still being used in schools such as Kurzweil 3000 and Read Please. These are great tools, but like Barbara mentioned, Kurzweil is quite expensive and therefore may not be an option in some schools. Our school has most of the textbooks scanned into Kurzweil and placed in a drive on the server so it can be easily accessed by students. Most texts now come with digitalized copies which make it easier to use in these types of text to speech programs. Plus it is not uncommon to see a set of headphones from a student’s neck so they could easily use this both in and outside the classroom without looking "out of place" so to speak. Also, students can take these CD copies of the text for home use and the textbooks can stay in the classroom for those that have computer access at home. Students love this; it lightens their load in their book bags! The poor junior high students who have 9 different courses often are carrying ALL their textbooks around with their scribblers, binders, pencil cases etc. Some of their book bags are bigger than they are! We also re-examined the Universal Design for Learning. By using the UDL framework we eliminate difficulties in learning that arise when diverse students try and work in rigid learning setting. The UDL framework minimizes barriers and maximizes learning for ALL students! Below is a link to an excellent website called the Learning Center where teachers shares their experiences with UDL-based Teaching and Learning in the form of videos and lesson plans. More free stuff...YEAH! Click her for this great link! My group is having so much fun with our second assignment where we create a blog full of material for an ecosystems unit to be utilized with a diverse group of grade 7 students. I found myself still working on it for almost an hour after class and added a few more things to it the next morning. What a great way to quickly and easily organize useful information for units. I think I am going to start this for all my units, it is like a one place stop and shop! Before when I came across a good website or video I would add it to my favorites but my favorites is now a couple pages long! Using a blog for each unit, all the material is there in one place and I do not need to go through pages of favorites or forget what I have in my favorites. I can easily scan through a blog like this and pick and choose what I want to use based on the students I have that year, awesome!! By having this information and links in a blog if a student is missing from class it is more accessible for them to access missed information this way. You can send them to the blog and direct them to a certain activity or video! I have all my students in a contact list so it would be very easy to send this information or link it to my homework page. I can not wait to see the other blog sites so I can build my resources so I too can minimizes barriers for my students and maximizes learning for ALL students!

Famous People with Disabilities

I really like this video as it goes to show you that having a disability does not mean that the person is any less able to achieve than anyone else, they may just have to do it in a different way! This video can help people with disabilities see that that it is possible to overcome barriers and that they are not alone. Many people with disabilities have contributed to society.

Class # 8: Learning Disabilities, the Writing Process and the Universal Design for Learning

Tonight was broken up into 3 sections. During the first section of class we broke into groups to watch segments of a series of videos entitle “Misunderstood Minds.” This series looks at the lives of different students with learning difficulties or disabilities and how each family worked together with experts to identify and cope with their learning difficulty. Each group viewed 3 videos from this series and then discussed the segments and summarized our findings in some sort of document. Our group chose to do ours in PowerPoint. I worked with Anna, Setz and Dallas and we viewed chapter 1, 4 and 5. The introduction to the videos talked about how one in five students find learning an exhausting and frustrating struggle. Too often these students are mistakenly called "lazy" or "stupid" by their teachers and peers but in actuality may be suffering from a learning disability. Each student thinks and learns differently so we as teachers need strategies to meet the needs of all our students. If not, continuing to label these students as "lazy" or "stupid" will have a devastating impact on our students self esteem, academic achievement and future. The following are the video segments that my group viewed and a summary of the child’s story depicted. Chapter 1- Nathan’s Story who has a phonemic awareness learning disability. Chapter 4 - Lauren’s Story who has attention difficulties in all areas. Chapter 5 – Sarah’s Story who has expressive language deficiency. Below is a link to the Power Point presentation my group created summarizing our findings. Click here for our Misunderstood Minds PowerPoint on Chapters 1, 4 & 5 Tonight we also looked at the writing task analysis. This task, just like the reading task broken down last week, is extremely complicated! As you can see from the concept map shown below created by our instructor, this can be a very daunting task for some. I think it is important for us as educators to step back and study such tasks reading and writing to better recognize and appreciate the complexity of these tasks for some of our students. Writing Task Analysis Concept Map:

At the end of the class we watched an awesome video on the Universal Design for Learning. If you have not viewed this video, I highly suggested you take the time to view it now!! I really enjoyed this video because I was able to make a connection between this class and another class I am taking presently,Assessment for Learning. I emailed the link to my instructor as soon as class was over! This video helped to solidify what I have been learning in both this class and assessment for learning.

Now more than ever we need to be cognizant of the highly diverse students in front of and the need for our curriculum and instruction to be designed to meet such diversity. We need to minimize barriers and maximize learning for all students, not just the majority! Each person brings their own background, strengths, needs and interests so the curriculum needs to provide genuine learning opportunities for every student. One size does not fit all!! As seen from the cartoon above, we need to move away from the traditional “one size fits all” approach to teaching. The Universal Design for Learning framework provides all students the opportunities to shape their own thinking and learning. By encorporating this framework into our practice we will start to see the following shift happening in our classrooms!

Functional MRI potential use video link

Below is a link to a TED talk video on on the potential uses of fMRI. Pretty interesting and worth a look. (4 minutes). TED video on fMRI - Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demonstrating a new way to use fMRI to show brain activity while it is happening.

Class # 7: The Reading Process

Tonight’s class really opened my eyes to the reading process and how I tend to take for granted that I can do this process with relative ease. Not everyone is as fortunate as this and because of this we need to look at task analysis. As a teacher, if I am to understand my students better I need to reexamine the details of task processes, such as reading and writing. I need to be able to break down complex behaviors, such as reading, into its component parts, in order to assist me in identifying and fitting in the appropriate assistive technology more easily. Many of the day-to-day tasks that we perform, without even attending to what we're doing, are really quite complex and are comprised of many smaller, specific sub-tasks that we perform in a certain order. Being a Biology teacher, during our study on the brain, I spend a short period of time talking about these processes and how at first learning something can be so hard, but after practicing it over time, turns into a task we can do without even thinking fully about the task. I often use the example of learning to tie your shoes. I get the students to try and think back when they first learned this task and how it felt and have a short discussion about this. Then I get then to take their shoe off and demonstrate for me their ability to tie their shoe. (Some have to share shoes if not wearing laced shoes that day-but we improvise!) Then I take my shoe off and untie it and ask for a volunteer to provide me with directions in tying my shoe and I follow their instructions word for word. I have yet to have a student that could break this seemly easy task down into all of its component steps so that I ended up successfully tying my shoe, but yet they all could do it themselves with such ease. We talk about how for some, simple tasks such as tying ones shoe, can seem so hard and frustrating and even impossible for others. I get them to remember how frustrated they were getting when their directions were not helping me in getting my shoe tied and how they just wanted to quit. Then we get into some great conversations on what happens when a step is left out or not there or a part of brain not working right and unable to do its job. These conversations often lead to questions about stroke patients and how they need to learn these complex tasks all over again even though before the stroke they could do it with relative ease. I find by doing this activity students gain a greater appreciation for the things they can do, understand that everyone is not the same and that some people may not be able to do seemingly “simple” tasks and the importance to take care of what we have and not abuse it (such as protecting head with helmet in sports and riding bikes, proper nutrition, sleep, the use of drugs etc). I really liked the activity of having to sit back and make note of all the different smaller tasks involved when we read a piece of text. By doing this, I gained a greater awareness of why so many have difficulties with such a complex task. There are so many areas that a student can have a deficit in that would affect the end product, being able to read and comprehends a piece of text. There is so much brain play occurring when we read. We talked about the importance of our students needing a rich language experience when entering school before experiencing print and how they need to be able to table those when learning to read. Printed words are really a representation of our oral language. Efficient reading involves accuracy decoding and speed of response and why we read is to get meaning from print. If any neural pathways go awry due to an accident, lack of nutrition etc, the reading process can be compromised. Tonight we looked at the levels of phonemic awareness and how this language is important before looking at print. For efficient reading one needs to be able to make the connection between sound and symbols. We also looked at the complex brain processing that occurs in the brain when we read. The electric to chemical transfer of the neurons need to be efficient and if it is not then it can affect things like reading. In Biology 12 we look at the drug ecstasy and how it affects the neurotransmitter serotonin and synaptic transmission. By affecting the synapse it can lead to poor concentration and forgetfulness which can affect learning and memory. A lot of students do not realize the complexity of the brain and how neurons work and the importance of them working in synchrony. They do not realize how drastic a hit or two of a drug such as ecstasy can alter this natural balance. We also looked at Marilyn Jagar Adams model of reading and how reading involves the constant connection and collaboration between various processors of the brain. We talked about the phonological, orthographic, meaning and context processors and how these processors must work efficiently and fluently together for reading to be successful. In the later part of the class we got into groups and created a concept map on the reading process. I was unable to attend class this particular night and watched the recording at a later date. Below is my concept map on the processes involved in reading. I really enjoy using inspiration myself and with my students. Inspiration is an excellent piece of software for concept mapping!